Jack Gantos Quotes

War destroys people's souls. Most people focus on physical injuries, but the invisible injuries can take a lifetime to heal and affects the lives of generations to come.

We don't want wars even when we win.

The maimed bodies aren't the worst. That's the easy way to hate war. The safe way. I - hate it just as much for the maimed souls that stay at home.

Wars don't happen on battlefields; they go on happening in people's hearts for generations and generations, and the ecological damage is unfathomably complex and dire.

Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.

If you are a real soldier, you never get over the war.

I did not know that the wounds of war are often invisible.

As wounded men may limp through life, so our war minds may not regain the balance of their thoughts for decades.

No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors. You accept things that would appall you at any other time because life has temporarily lost all meaning.

Uncle fought in Vietnam and then he fought a war all by himself.

The great lesson to be learned in the battered towns of England and the ruined cities of Germany is that the best way to win a war is to prevent it from occurring.

The war does not end when you come home. It lives on in memories of your fellow soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who gave their lives. It endures in the wound that is slow to heal, the disability that isn't going away, the dream that wakes you at night, or the stiffening in your spine when a car backfires down the street.

When you talk about the mental health problems, when people come back from war and combat and they see things that maybe a lot of the folks in this room have seen many times over and you're strong and you can handle it. But a lot of people can't handle it. And they see horror stories. They see events that you couldn't see in a movie, nobody would believe it.

[Neurotics are] torn by inner conflicts ... Every neurotic ... is at war with himself.

There is no war so important that to win it, we must destroy our minds.

The more I've traveled to war zones, the more I'm convinced that the impact and the effects are way beyond anything we can even begin to imagine.

When I turn the thought around - the thought that war, let's say war in Iraq, should stop - the turnaround is the war in myself should stop.

Another of the hard things about being in a war, grandchildren, is that although there are times of quiet when the fighting has stopped, you know you will soon be fighting again. Those quiet times give you the chance to think about what has happened. Some of it you would rather not think about, as you remember the pain and the sorrow. You also have time to worry about what will happen when you go into battle again.

While I was girl of the year and superstar and all that crap, everything I did was really...motivated by psychological disturbance.

The slanders of the pen pierce to the heart; they rankle longest in the noblest spirits; they dwell ever present in the mind and render it morbidly sensitive to the most trifling collision.

Often we combat our evil thoughts most effectively if we absolutely refuse to allow them to be expressed in words.

For me war has become a flat, black depression without highlights, a revulsion of the mind and an exhaustion of the spirit.

But I'm not ready to stop listening to the screwed-up inner voice that's been ordering me around for a lifetime. My head thinks it can kill me... and go on living without me.

Millions cheer the warriorspilling blood across the ringwhile the one who stands for peaceis ridiculed and shamed.Must hearts forever sufferfrom ignorance and greed?Can bombs heal our soulsor set our spirits free?